METHODOLOGY

Introduction

This study is designed to be empirically grounded, qualitative in methodological orientation, and socio-cultural in its conceptual framing. The study focuses on how Chinese undergraduate students in humanities subjects at a UK university describe the major academic challenges they encountered and explains, from their perspectives, how they cope with these challenges during their study. Qualitative research methods were used in this study to gain insight into the students‘ experience, attitudes,

behaviours, value system, concerns, motivations and culture.

In this chapter, I address how I position myself in this study; how I constructed the conceptual framework used in the study; and some methodological challenges.

Positionality – my learning journey

My experience of being both an ‗insider‘, with regard to the Chinese student

community, and an ‗outsider‘, in relation to the academic community within the UK, places me in a good position to conduct an enquiry of Chinese student experience. However, it is important to consider how my own experience of education might have influenced the research questions and the choices of methods to study these questions. It is necessary to state my positionality by telling my own learning journey from China to UK.

I was born in a small town in the central China in 1978. The province in which my hometown is located is mainly agriculture based. My parents were working in a small factory at the time. My father was a technician and my mother was a factory worker on the production line. My grandparents were living in a small village which was not far away from the town. One year later, my younger brother was born. Due to the start of the one-child policy in China, my parents were penalised for having the second child. Their salaries were frozen for a year. It made family life extremely hard without their income.

97 I started primary school at the age of eight. There were no kindergartens or nurseries available in the town. Even if they had been available, my family probably would not have been able to afford to send me and my younger brother. In my second year in the primary school, my parents left the factory and started their own small manufacturing business. In 1988, it was still rare to see private businesses in inland cities in China. The factory employed about 10 workers. It was very hard for my parents to make it profitable because there was not much support for private business, such as credit from banks and networks for selling the products across regions. They were too busy with the business to look after two young boys at home. As a result, they decided to send me to stay with a distant relative of the family in a remote village about 15 km away from my home.

At the time, I was not very happy to leave home to study in the countryside. It was mainly because I had to leave my friends and familiar environment and enter into the unknown. The living conditions and harshness of the life in the village were much worse than I had expected. There was no electricity and the nearest town was five kilometres away. Drinking water was taken from a shared well. It took about 30 minutes to walk to the village primary school. When it rained or snowed, it took much longer. The family I stayed with treated me like one of their own sons and I started to get to know some of the neighbours‘ children. In the following two years, I was fully engaged with life in the village. Like many other children, I had to work in the field after the school particularly in harvest seasons. There was some fun living in a village as well. For instance, there was not big pressure to study very hard as long as you could pass the tests. You would treasure all opportunities for entertainment, like watching a movie. In order to see a movie, I would normally walk miles to another village in the evening. This was often a treat for me and other kids because movies were only played on special occasions like weddings and the birth of baby boys. The movies were shown in an open field and powered by a petrol-powered electricity generator. While you were enjoying the movie, you would also pray for good weather so it would not be interrupted.

My mother visited me from time to time and I rarely went to home due to the distance. It was the happiest time when my mother visited me, however I was very sad to say goodbye to her at the end of each visit. I did not like the village life most of

98 the time and I found it too hard. However, these two years provided me with an

opportunity to witness how harsh the life could be in the rural China. Many years later, whenever I have a difficult time, I always tell myself there could not be anything worse than coping with the life in that village. If you very much dislike or fear such life conditions, you will work harder to make a difference. Now I believe my experience in those two years has motivated me to strive against the odds in my later life. Every time I recollect my memory of living in the village, I feel appreciative for the decision my father had made even though I did not see it that way at the time. Soon after I reunited with my family, we moved to a small city and my father gave up the private business and joined a state-owned factory as an engineer. The main reason for the move was that my father wanted me and my brother to get a better education in a city. My study in high school was not standing out at all. I attributed this to the fact that I had received a disadvantaged primary school education in the small town and the village. However, I made a real effort to catch up with the rest of the class in the following six years. I was suffering in some of the subjects. For example, I did not enjoy the subjects like English and politics. It seemed all subjects were taught for the purpose of preparing for different levels of the exam. I did not see how they could apply to real life. I did not do very well in the National College Entrance Exam in 1996. I only managed to be accepted on a two-year diploma course in a provincial agricultural university. I was admitted to a course to study Food Sanitation and Quarantine.

I enjoyed every minute of the two years at the agricultural university. The university is located in Zhengzhou, a provincial city famous for its light industry and its location as a transportation hub linking many parts of China. Studying at the university

provided me with a new perspective in life. If the experience of the village showed me how harsh life could be, then my initial university experience convinced me how wonderful life and the future could be. Without the burden of exams, I just enjoyed learning more and fully participating in many student societies and clubs. I was rewarded with a small scholarship for each term based on my academic performance; I was an athlete competing in 10,000 metre races and I was even selected to join the Communist Party at the end of the first year. Everything seemed very rosy and, like many other university students, I was expecting to be assigned to a job by the state

99 after my study. However, in 1998, this policy was abolished by the government in the context of decentralisation of state-owned enterprises and cutting down the number of civil servants. It was very challenging to find a job in Zhengzhou and I returned home after my study. There were no graduate jobs in my home city. Both my parents had left the state-owned factory and set up a new private business to support the family. My younger brother was helping them. I did not want to be involved in the business as I found it unattractive.

In 1998, I left home and went to the capital city, Beijing, to take another two-year diploma course in Business English at China Agricultural University. It was considered to be essential to speak good English in order to find a decent job in the capital. Under pressure to make a living, English learning became the centre of my life in those two years. There were a number of American language tutors who taught us English speaking skills. In order to practise my spoken English, I was one of eager students in the class who often liked to answer tutors‘ questions. I developed

confidence to speak English. As a by-product, I now speak English with a trace of a North American accent. In July 2000, I finished my study with reasonable English proficiency and started to look for a job in Beijing. It was challenging to get a job but it was possible. Eventually, I found a job as an Assistant Marketing Manager in a medium size computer software company in Beijing‘s Zhongguanchun – the Chinese Silicon Valley. The company specialises in developing and producing software application for the Globe Positioning System (GPS) and electronic maps. It was exciting to work in the information technology (IT) industry as it was predicted that IT would transform people‘s life and the way of conducting business. The job

involved travelling around China to attend IT exhibitions including some international ones. My English skills were put in practice in the workplace when foreign business partners visited the company. Two years later, I reached the career glass ceiling. It seemed that a job promotion needed a higher academic qualification and experience of working in a different company. I did not see the possibilities of advancing my career without the above credentials. I was planning to move to another job in an internet company after a headhunting agent approached me. However, it did not work out following the bursting of the ‗internet bubble‘ in China in 2002. With small savings and family support, I decided to study in the UK and invest in a master‘s degree.

100 In 2003, I arrived in Liverpool and started with an intensive English course prior to the planned master degree. On my arrival, I felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety. It was just wonderful to be able to see blue skies (on non-rainy days) and vast green areas around the campus. It was a huge contrast to Beijing‘s often murky skies which most believe are a result of the pollution of heavy industries around the city and busy traffic inside it. However, it was also a shock to discover that I only understood a few words of English when I talked with British people. There were strange accents, a faster speed of talking, and wider use of unfamiliar phrases. Even after first three months, I was still struggling with English language proficiency. I then realised that it was not possible for me to improve my language skills dramatically and develop a deep understanding of British culture within a further year‘s taught master‘s degree. Subsequently, the study plan was changed from a one-year master degree to a three- year undergraduate degree in IT. With a background of working in the IT industry and prior knowledge, I did pretty well in the degree and eventually gained a first class degree. However, during these three years I had to work extremely hard to support my study financially due to the change in the study plan. My part time work ranged from being a cleaner, restaurant waiter, chef, university library assistant, community

volunteer, IT technician to university tutor. These work experiences provided me with not only the financial means but also an opportunity to get to know more about British society and people.

Immediately after completing the undergraduate degree, I was awarded a full

scholarship to continue my study at the master‘s level in the same university. On the completion of the master degree in Computer Science, I was offered a job as IT Research and Support Specialist in the university.

The idea of conducting a research degree on Chinese undergraduate students‘

experience in the UK comes from both my professional interest and the importance of such research. The research fulfils the requirements of a PhD degree, while at the same time it is fulfilling the need of the institution as the whole. It addresses one of the major priorities of the institution: the overriding need for the academic support of overseas students.

101 In my previous studies, I taught the International Foundation Programme. During the teaching, I discovered that many Chinese students encountered difficulties with their studies here in the UK. They reported that they found academic writing, among other aspects of learning, to be the most challenging task. I was keen to help them with their difficulties, and was inspired to investigate what challenges Chinese students face in the learning and how they respond.

In order to prepare for the proposed research, a funded pilot study on the challenges Chinese students face in academic writing was conducted in 2007. The pilot study was conducted at two universities in Liverpool among 200 Chinese students. The pilot study helped me make sense of Chinese students‘ overall experience in UK

universities.

The next section explains how I constructed the analytical framework for the research.

A framework of analysis

The study is designed to be empirically grounded, qualitative in methodological orientation, and socio-cultural in its conceptual framing. The latter is important given the potential uncertainty of any study of this kind: any study, that is, that is virtually limitless in its capacity for generating questions. In the first year of my study the development of a framework of analysis that (a) gathers what I see to be the salient issues and questions (b) guides and informs the analysis and (c) provides a tentative structure for the thesis as a whole, has been of paramount importance. It has also been difficult and demanding, precisely because of the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of the research topic.

My starting point is the fairly obvious insight that overseas students of Chinese origin who are studying in the UK come to higher education with very different values and approaches to learning and teaching than do their UK counterparts. It is highly likely that the expectations of Chinese students are greatly influenced by their social, cultural and educational contexts of origin and that these expectations influence the learning approaches and strategies they choose to adopt as students within the UK.

102 Their cognitive and learning styles are shaped, in part, by these contexts of origin. I would like to understand that aspect of transition more fully.

When students of Chinese origin study as undergraduates in the UK, they encounter numerous unpredictabilities over and above the daunting unpredictabilities faced by indigenous students. Not only must they wrap their heads around their chosen discipline or field of study, but they must do this within an educational and cultural context which differs hugely from their own. They are also managing this transition in a second and in some cases a third language. Chinese students within the UK are studying in multiple, complicated, overlapping and sometimes contradictory contexts of learning. There is no ready-made framework which I can adopt for what I have chosen to study. I must construct that framework for myself – what the textbooks refer to as ‗bricolage‘.

In the first three months of my doctoral study, I spent at least an hour each week discussing with the primary supervisor, how to develop a conceptual framework – or a kind of theoretical searchlight – to sustain and cast light on my study. This was a new idea for me, since my previous postgraduate work had not entailed this kind of wide- ranging reading and ‗theorising‘ that is essential for this way of working. In the supervision meetings, different theoretical perspectives were brought to bear on the research topic and gradually a set of research questions emerged. But I had to keep testing and re-testing these against the literature and my own understanding of the literature. This was fun – highly disciplined fun – but fun nevertheless. This is a very exciting phase in the development of any intellectual enquiry.

Through discussions with the primary supervisor and literature review a number of key concepts emerged: among them, ‗origin‘, ‗destination‘, and ‗multiple-identity‘. In drawing out this conceptual thread, I found it useful to visualise the conceptual

relations and to express these relations in terms of models. My past postgraduate experience had provided me with the technical resources necessary to develop my thinking along these lines. Perhaps if my experience had been different, then I would have worked with these inter-relations in different ways. I have learned that it is important to work with the intellectual resources one has and to make the very best of them. So, I am reasonably good at visualising conceptual relations by drawing models

103 – and I use that capability to push forward my thinking and inform my discussions and presentations.

My first model – my starting point – represents three overlapping contexts which are of relevance to the student experience that I am studying: context/s of origin

(Chinese), context/s of destination (UK and, more specifically, England), and the institutional context/s (HE) within which the students participating in this enquiry hope to graduate (See Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1: Contexts of the study

I found I needed to explore in greater detail the content of the overlapping circles that comprise Figure 4.1. This exploration involved further reading and discussion. The category of ‗Chinese contexts of origin‘ opened up diverse specialist literatures relating, for example, to geopolitical and geo-economic contexts, Chinese educational values, Chinese traditions and family structures, the Chinese education system, and English language education in China. In exploring these literatures, I found important sub-topics: for example, the literature relating to geopolitical and geo-economic contexts opens up subsidiary literatures on students‘ education experiences, urban